Autor: John Vinocur

Iran, its conference of Holocaust negationists last month, its contest of Holocaust cartoons, its calls for the destruction of Israel, its drive for nuclear weapons, its more actively disturbing in Iraq - none are mentioned in the resolution.

The newspaper has focused attention on the idea that the Christian presence in the Middle East - an estimated 10 million believers - is now critically threatened by Islamic hard- liners.

Nicolas Sarkozy is damned smart, a won't-flinch brawler and survivor, and the only politician in France whose ambitions have been solidified by the country's dreadful months of underclass riots and no-to-change demonstrations.

Jacques Chirac is discredited, Dominique de Villepin, too, and with them, it seems, a certain France that told the world it could avoid change and, as exceptionalist as ever, escape immobility's ridiculousness in the process.

If the French didn't fill the streets to protest four hours less work per week at the same pay, the 35-hour ploy turned out to be a mirage, imitated nowhere else in Europe, and so complex that it underpinned rather than reversed French employers' standard equation: new hires equal intolerable risk.

France, once more the contrarian, is offering up some carefully ambiguous hard talk these days on managing the emergence of Iran as a nuclear threat - at a time when Hillary Clinton has accused the Bush administration of downplaying the problem

After six weeks as German chancellor, Angela Merkel represents a kind of political bliss. So far it's been all pink clouds.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is asked if Spain's offer of planes and ships hasn't bestowed European legitimization on a man the United States argues is using his country's enormous oil wealth to take an aggressively destabilizing course in Latin America. Zapatero's answer: No.

If the U.S. has historically had more success in integrating its immigrants than Europe does nowadays, it's because the American work ethic makes greater demands on the newcomers than Europe's welfare societies - at the same time that America offers a job-related payback in dignity and the prospect of success.